


Imaginary stages of grief

by faceofstone



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Abstract, Aftermath, Dianes plural, Gen, red room and other locales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:21:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29218638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: The sort that can’t be expressed in the real field, but still has its uses. Diane is, by now, at best a variable; Naido can only ever be her dolorous self.
Relationships: Diane Evans & Naido
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Imaginary stages of grief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beatrice_Sank](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/gifts).



> (just three stages ‘cause I was running out of Dianes, had it been Coops we would’ve given Kübler-Ross a run for their money, just saying. Cheers!)

**1 _i_ repose**

The scene set for Linda’s return follows a universal script. The horrible boyfriend (Richard, this one is called, but we’re talking more archetype-like, his contours already blurring as soon as he’s off camera) is out of her life, thrown away like a sack of potatoes, which is so say, probably not too far, and bad choices always fester. But! For now, she is free, breathing again through her tears and smeared eyeliner, mourning and triumphant for having walked away. So she crosses the apartment door like a triumphal arch and finds her celebration awaiting her: slippers, her flatmate curled up on the couch, comfort blankets at the ready, red wine already poured in two capacious glasses, leftover dinner in the microwave. Tale as old as time.

“Thanks, Naido,” she bawls, lump in her throat making her drawl out her words with even more determination than usual. “You’re a treasure.”

Naido chirps something in her foreign tongue, shivering in her flannel pyjamas. The solid wall of flesh where her eyes would be frowns somewhat in a sympathetic fashion. She’s good. They’re good. No matter how bad things get, Linda will always have this place.

The horrible boyfriend is out in the world somewhere – one could say he’s out in all worlds at once, and interestingly enough, they would be right both from within Linda’s perspective and without, for vastly different reasons. This haunting presence is relevant because it marks an outside, where Richard (was that his name?) could conceivably be, and an inside where he is not. Linda exists, for now, in a bubble of cheap red fleece and acceptable red wine, within the slightly larger bubble that is their flat with its faded carpeting and rickety wooden paneling and impeccable designer interior lighting which blends all warm tones into a pitch-perfect golden hue. To the vast night outside, two words: fuck off.

“What an asshole,” Linda concludes. It’s a flatmate’s sworn duty to agree in these situations so presumably that’s what Naido does, in so many trills and warbles.

Once the microwave pings that their dinner’s ready, they crawl back into their diminutive couch, shoulder against shoulder, a good place to rest one’s head, and when they’re not busy with forks and platters they join hands too, like childhood friends, which they may well be. They watch TV together, Naido offers some commentary Linda doesn’t catch, and it must be a documentary they’ve got on this channel because if it’s a story, there’s a hole where its leading lady should be. Like they ran out of those. Not that it matters.

**2 _i_ reverberation**

Linda is now fast asleep on the couch, safely tucked into her blanket. Naido rises to get to work: out there in the house, there is a bead to string, to make the latest addition to a very long necklace, for prayer and for mourning. She takes a needle out of her hairdo and feels her way out of the couch and toward the corridor. They must have left it on the table, the marble table, the cold table, and she knows the way, clinging to velvet curtains from room to room.

The bead is there, golden, Naido knows, as an intrinsic quality rather than a color she has never seen. Her fingers drum around the marble surface until they find it and as her skin touches the metal she is pushed back by a small electrostatic shock, a spark of energy the bead was holding tight inside. As it uncoils, the golden sphere is equally propelled forward. It rolls across the surface of the table, defiant, falls to the ground, bounces once and continues its stubborn trajectory on the floor.

Naido listens to its low ringing noise and follows the bead through an empty room, a string quartet’s rehearsal, a corridor containing only the spluttering of a stove, a corridor which sounds empty, another empty room, television static, the crackling of firewood, two people speaking words she does not understand. By now, she does not know the way anymore. She keeps going out of duty and inertia and the two forces’ occasional overlap. There are statues, she suspects, but they remain silent. The bead rolls on. More empty rooms, evoking the feeling of having followed an arm of a galaxy to its outward reaches, far away from the populated center. The complex calls of birds. Rustling fabric. The bead slides through a gap in the velvet and Naido follows, and when no more curtains meet her outstretched hands she knows that she is standing in a vast and silent plain, far away from any landmark. Her feet touch grass.

Eventually, a car’s engine roars in the far distance.

**3 _i_ dispersal**

There is not much left of Diane. The part of her that is walking into the motel with Cooper is marching to her death and knows it, look at her, terrified and holding onto her loyalty like it’s a knife that won’t cut her own head off. What remains, the echo that’s left staring into the void as she leans against the colonnade, won’t withstand a gust of wind. So the wind rises and she is not there.

Night air. Drafts. Currents. A breath over shrubs and red rocks. The wooden door of an unknown diner, lit against the darkness by jolly overhead spotlights. It feels like rest, at last.

“What’s a woman got to do to get a cup of coffee ‘round these parts?” she says, forcing the words out as she walks through the entrance, not by holding the door open but through the glass panel and the metal décor and the wood splinters which don’t hurt but still feel like they should.

“Got a cup of coffee?” she asks again as nobody seems to be paying her attention, but it comes out raspy, closer to “ghost”, which all in all is fair enough.

There are two women sitting across the counter. The waitress, blonde girl in her thirties, barely holding onto a spent cigarette in her mouth like a stain on her pressed, spotless green uniform, is holding hands with the diner’s lone client, Diane notwithstanding as she probably doesn’t count, you couldn’t respect max capacity anywhere if you started including memories and echoes, it is known. The client… that’s the friend you want in the deep of night, regal in her velvet dress, motherly and commanding, eyes stitched closed to the ugliness of your wounds no less than to that of the world that caused them. Naido holds the waitress’ hands and they’re steady as stone, granitic veins advancing up her forearms as coarse quartz reflects the ceiling light overhead.

“Hi, Naido. Never mind me, then,” says Diane. “I’ll grab a stool. Don’t tell me – no pie either.”

The radio cuts its crooning for a commercial that goes on and on about the price of gold and as its words sink in there’s a change in Naido’s demeanor, not so much the resurfacing of a forgotten commitment as the terrible realization that being bound by time and atoms means that ubiquity is a no-go and there’s nothing more gut-wrenchingly mundane than having to stick to timetables, commitments, priorities. She untangles her hands from the waitress’ petrified body and slides off her stool, getting her bearing and eventually inviting Diane to follow her outside again. They have to open the door to go through.

“I am bound to continue her motion,” chirps Naido in lieu of an explanation.

“Whose? Oh don’t give me that look, sure you have an _accent_ but don’t think I haven’t heard worse transcribing tapes at the office.”

“Strange office.”

“You bet.”

**over ℂ**

They cross the desert, side by side. The trail of Naido’s dress covers their tracks so no-one will ever read whether there were two persons on that journey or just one.

What they find at the end of things (they could walk past it, but they would not go any further, and they know it with the same degree of certainty as they know there is nothing metaphorical about it) is not a fortress, if not for its ramparts and a bleak bare tower somewhere in its perimeter. A graveyard, perhaps, but long abandoned, in the way big ugly heaps of concrete lend themselves to be reclaimed by nature, as if by some law of opposites attracting. The front door’s open and there are benches strewn across the inner courtyard, which is a garden, its wilderness protected, yet another place of repose but to what end. They pace in circles at the end of things, until Naido is tired and drapes herself over a bench.

“I brought you down here, didn’t I,” says Diane, prickling her finger against an agave. A bird chirps, a real bird hidden in the real dark branches of a tall shrub in the distance. There is life in this place even if the sharp starlight makes the night look black and white like an old etching. “That’s why you’re with me. Out of the purple frying pan and into the fucking fire. No, no, no.”

“Do not struggle,” says Naido. The bench is stone. Perhaps it always was.

“No, no, no. There’s a place for us,” replies Diane as she points a trembling finger at a star in the sky, by virtue of all closer destinations being taken, rotten, dead. Missing a ladder long enough to get them there, Diane falls to her knees on the naked earth and digs out a handful of dirt, that they can fall into the ground and through the endless night until a better life takes them. But the world does not crack open and every handful only ever reveals more soil, roots, cold damp rocks, and she’s light and not all there, a fucking ghost in a graveyard, all her efforts useless forever, and all she can do is cry.

It is night again by the time she plants her aching, trembling hands atop the small hole she has dug and gives up. No more struggles. All she had left, she gave to the earth, and she is so very light. When the wind changes, Diane sits next to Naido, shoulder to shoulder in absolute stillness at the end of things. They hold hands. The wind rises and fills her ears. She closes her eyes. The two women are gone.


End file.
